


all roads lead home

by astrolesbian



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-09-08
Packaged: 2018-04-16 18:06:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4635057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrolesbian/pseuds/astrolesbian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lan Fan’s life has centered around what she is willing to do for a long time, longer than she can remember; it is the legacy of her family, of her grandfather and great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather, guarding the Yao princes and princesses. (She will be the first to guard an emperor.)</p><p>She must be willing to sacrifice everything, anything. Her life, or more than that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. all things must end

**Author's Note:**

> a bit of a character study on lan fan, as well as a lot of fleshing out of my headcanons concerning xing + xingese politics + the hoops that ling is going to have to jump through in order to change his country. basically i just really, really adore all these characters and we weren't given as much about them in canon as i would have liked to see.
> 
> this will most likely have two chapters / one-shots, sort of connected. the first being the trip home from amestris (across the desert) and the second when ling is already emperor, concerning marriage.

There is nothing left to say by the time they are at the edge of the desert, burning her grandfather’s body. Or rather, there should be nothing left to say. She should be standing tall, to give him the send-off he deserves; one fit for a warrior, one with dignity.  

Except that she sees something red in the distance, and falls to her knees before the pyre, because all she can think about is the berry bushes her grandfather tended back at his cottage, and how there will be no one to care for them, not now. 

She tears off her mask, and throws it behind her, and clenches her hands into fists, nearly drawing blood from the sharp press of her fingernails against her palms.

“Lan Fan,” the young lord says, his voice choked and pleading, and she squeezes her eyes shut. She can hear the tears in his voice, and can picture them on his face. A hand settles on her shoulder, and she jerks away.

“Don't touch me,” she spits, and she loves him, but she hates him, and she hates this goddamned country, and she wants to be home, and she wants to be young again, she wants to be a child in her grandfather’s cottage, training for the day when she will protect the Yao heir, picking leaves from the garden to make tea, learning how to fight a man twice her size and win. She wants, she wants, she wants. Has she already lost her way? It is not about what she wants; it has never been about what she wants. “Please. It's improper of me—”

“Don’t you dare,” he says, and his voice shakes. “Don’t you dare. You’re allowed this. Please don’t think—”

She is quiet, and Grandfather burns in front of her, and she stares into the flames. He was a man of duty, her grandfather. He would tell her not to cry, that he died with honor, that she must not upset the young lord further; that all things must end, and there is no use crying over what is done. 

But then she remembers his face pressed to her empty sleeve, and his tears soaking it. He wept for her arm. He wept for her. _All things must end, granddaughter—_ and yet.

A tear leaks down her cheek. The young lord makes a concerned noise in the back of his throat and moves closer. “Lan Fan—”

She stands. 

“It would do well for you to not be so familiar with me in court, your highness,” she says.

“Court can eat shit,” the young lord says hotly. “You know I don’t care about that.”

There was a time when she would have smiled at him, talking like that, safe behind her mask. She does not smile today. “A good king cares for his people, but I am beneath you,” she says, and she can hear the dullness in her own voice, her own desperate attempt to cover an ache. He moves away as if she has burned him, shaking his head furiously. His eyes are full of fire and she can't look at them directly for long, can only feel them where they are fixed on her face. “Go to the tent. You need your rest.”

His fingers touch her face, warm in the desert night. She wishes she could jerk away, but part of her longs for this; part of her rejoices at his touch. “What about what you need?” he asks.

His voice is rough, angry. He always thinks he can fix everything, the young master. She wants to catch his hand and kiss it. 

It is not proper. What would Grandfather say? To find that the moment he is gone, she is acting above her station, daring to love a king? _All things must end,_ and so must this. She is not his equal here, nor will she be in Xing. She must stop forgetting that.

“Grandfather is with the gods,” she says, and her voice sounds too hollow, too frail. Too weak. She forces steel back into it and sweeps her grandfather’s ashes into an urn. “He will be welcomed with honor.” 

She nods, trying to look like she is doing it with finality, as though that is the end of things. 

“I will take first watch, young lord. You must get your rest.”

The young lord sighs, and takes a step back, slowly, as if he is waiting for her to call him back. She must not. She must remember. All things must end, and so this silly ache in her heart will end. He will marry a princess. He will have sons and daughters. She will watch over them, too.

All things must end, and it is not her place to love a king. Two things that Grandfather taught her. Two things she must remember.

He turns, and vanishes into the tent, and she is alone with the urn, the sun beginning to come up over the desert. She puts on her mask, and settles into her skin, and chants it to herself, over and over— _you cannot love him like this, you cannot, you cannot; what would Grandfather say?_

She can see the edges of the Amestrian desert town in the distance, and, even farther, a fire flickering. The sun has set, and the pyre is in embers.

She wraps her arms closer around herself and refuses to admit she is cold.

 

Lan Fan’s life has centered around what she is willing to do for a long time, longer than she can remember; it is the legacy of her family, of her grandfather and great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather, guarding the Yao princes and princesses. (She will be the first to guard an emperor.)

She must be willing to sacrifice everything, anything. Her life, or more than that.

“But what can be more than my life?” she asked her grandfather one afternoon, and he had been alive then, in the dappled sunlight of fall. 

“Will you give it?” he had asked, deflecting the question.

“I will!” she had said, and she remembered how the words had burned within her, centering her, giving her a goal. This was what mattered. This was what she could do, to help her clan. “But what could be more?”

“You will find out, one day,” Grandfather had said, gravely. “When you sacrifice it.”

She did not understand, then. 

She understands now.

 

“You ought to take off your mask,” Mei Chang says, the next day. “You could get heatstroke.”

Lan Fan keeps her head bowed. If she gets heatstroke, it will be from her new metal arm, not from her mask. She wore her mask all the way here, and here she is today.

“Did you hear me?”

“I heard, Lady Chang,” Lan Fan says, and she can feel the dullness creeping back into her voice as she says it. 

“Aren’t you worried, about the heat?” Mei Chang’s small face is open, more honest than any she has seen in a long time. She bears them no ill will. Lan Fan tries, constantly, to remember that.

“I have crossed the desert in my mask before, Lady Chang,” Lan Fan says. “I expect I will do it again.”

Mei frowns, but Lan Fan turns away. She knows what the question was—an offer, of comradeship, of friendship, even. 

She does not take it, and she walks on. The metal of her arm heats and heats until she can feel it through her clothes, firey hot. 

She walks on. Soon they will be back in Xing, and the young lord will be emperor, and they will bury her grandfather. 

Listing all these things aloud does not make any sense of them.

 

She had been defined by what she is willing to do for a long time, but it was only recently that she began to be defined, also, by what she refused to do.

She supposes that she has always, in part, refused to do quite a lot—she would not allow herself to fail, she would not allow herself to give up, she would not allow the young lord to be hurt. But these all tie together with what she is willing to do, and—

Now, she refuses to hope.

(He would laugh, if he heard her being so melodramatic. She would smile, and it would sink into a frown as soon as he looked away. She is tired. She has had enough, she thinks. Enough of hoping.)

They left Xing burning with purpose, and they return weighted down. Her shoulder is heavy, but what holds her down is the ache all over her body, the one that comes from fighting a battle she knows she will lose. 

Her grandfather will not come back, and she will not win on her own.

She does not know how to mourn. It is something he never had to teach her.

She does not know how to mourn, so she keeps walking, and her body aches.

 

“I can fix them, if you like,” Mei offers one night, when they are in the tent, and the young lord is taking his watch. “The burns, from your arm.”

Lan Fan’s fingers fly to her shoulder, brushing the barest amount against the patches of red that have spread over her shoulder, where metal meets skin. Mei blinks at her, smiling uncertainly, her little panda crouched on her shoulder.

Mei Chang is a tiny thing, and in an odd way, she terrifies Lan Fan, who does not know what to expect from her. She seems content with second place, content with her clan rising along with the others to equality in Xing. It is so uncommon for a courtier to be so genuinely uncaring of class and rank that it leaves Lan Fan confused, and she treads lightly around the little girl, leaving the tent when she and the young master get to talking. 

Of course, Mei Chang’s complete disregard for class and rank means that she treats Lan Fan like an equal, like she wishes for them to be friends. Lan Fan is used to this behavior from the young master, and she can ignore it with him, pretend it doesn’t mean anything, pretend she doesn’t wish it could be true. With the little Chang girl, it is different.

Mei Chang should not have been a princess, Lan Fan thinks. She should have been a little girl, a talented alchemist. She should have been able to stay in Amestris with her newfound friends, and she should not have had to carry a clan on her shoulders. She is too sweet to be a courtier and too strong a fighter to be a civilian, too talented at alchemy to be just a normal little girl. 

“Are you still angry because I tried to kill you?” Mei asks, and her eyes are wide and girlish, innocent; at complete contrast with what she’s said. “I would never do it now. I only did it then because of my clan, and how they needed me.”

This, at least, Lan Fan understands. 

“And anyway,” Mei continues. “Ling is my favorite of all my brothers. He’s certainly been nice to me.”

Sometimes, Lan Fan forgets that Mei Chang is only thirteen years old. For all intents and purposes, she is just a child. At seventeen, Lan Fan feels impossibly older, stained on the insides from the loss of her arm, and then of her grandfather. 

“I am not angry, Lady Chang,” Lan Fan says. “But this is not proper behavior for a princess.”

“Well,” Mei says. “I am an alchehestrist when they told me not to be, and I went to save my clan when they all wanted me to stay inside and do nothing but look pretty all day, so that one day the new emperor would choose me and grace me with his child.” Her eyes are so wide and dark that she looks younger than she is, like she is just ten, or eleven. Lan Fan blinks. “I am actually on speaking terms with one of my half-siblings, and I think the best friend I’ve ever had is back there in Amestris, and it’s likely I won’t see him for a long, long time. I am not exactly a conventional princess, Lan Fan. You will have to find another reason that we should not be friends.”

“Lady Chang,” Lan Fan says, “my grandfather would turn in his grave, if I were to act above my station in such a way.” It is bolder than she usually is with Ling. It is bolder than she usually is with anyone. 

“I don’t wish to mock your pain, or indicate any disrespect towards him,” Mei says, and her voice is soft. “But I grew up without any friends at all, because everyone was so concerned with treating me like a princess. And Lan Fan, I would have rather had friends.” She looks down at her hands, and Lan Fan watches her, feeling safe behind the confines of her mask. “And he—he only had you and Fu, for such a long, long time. And now he only has you. And I think that he would rather you be his friend, don’t you?”

The trouble, Lan Fan thinks, when she says this, was that it was not quite so simple as that, no matter how Mei tried to make it seem. This was her place in life, she had been born into it; she loved it. She wanted more. They were not exclusive. 

She wanted to protect him, forever, and stay by his side as his loyal guard. She wanted to turn back time a few months and find him a little bit earlier, before he accepted Greed into his body. She wanted to turn back time further than that and never lose her arm. She wanted to be his friend. She wanted to save her grandfather. She wanted to kiss him on the mouth, and find out if she could taste the spices of their homeland on his lips. She wanted to go back to her grandfather’s garden.

She wanted so much, and so little of it was possible. 

“The trouble,” she says, finally, “is that I don’t know how.”

She doesn’t know how to stop loving him and serving him long enough to just be his friend. She doesn’t know how to forget the things her grandfather had told her. She doesn’t know how to forget it wouldn’t be allowed to last, even if they tried.

“Then learn, with me,” Mei says, and her eyes are so dreadfully hopeful.

“Lady Chang,” Lan Fan says. “I think you ought to be his friend, if you are so insistent that he have one.”

“He wants you,” Mei says. “There’s nothing I can do about that, not when he misses you so much.”

Mei did not say anything else for a long moment, and the words seem to hang in the air above Lan Fan’s head, waiting for her to finish mulling over them.

“Do you wish something of me, Lady Chang?” she asks, finally. Mei smiles, and it is a sad little thing, nothing like the way she had laughed before. 

“Only your happiness,” she says. “And to help heal the burns on your shoulder before Ling finds out about them, and tries to find a way to stop the sun shining on you.”

Lan Fan feels her cheeks flush, dark, and she is grateful for her mask. 

“I would be most grateful,” she says, “if you were to heal my burns, Lady Chang.”

“Good,” Mei says, and her smile touches her eyes this time. “That’s a step.”

 

The nights are too cold, and the days are too hot. Lan Fan spends her days trudging along in the sand, her shoulder burning red and harsh, and her evenings being healed under the steady hands of Mei Chang, and her nights keeping watch, and feeling blank and empty and _not enough_ anymore, not without Grandfather. 

“Who was it?” Mei asks one night. “Who killed him?”

Lan Fan’s mind flashes back to Bradley, his eyes like steel as he cut off her arm; his eyes like fire as he said _that is what it means, to be the wife of the Fuhrer._

She shudders, and Mei blinks. 

“King Bradley,” she says, her voice dull again. 

_My wife understands. She is the woman I chose._

His words had cut through her, far enough that she wondered if his eye could see through to the soul. Suddenly she was fourteen years old again, and Ling’s smiling face was hovering in front of her, and he was saying _I’m glad I chose you, Lan Fan._

Mei was watching her, but she was still lost in the memory, of her feet making no noise as she crossed the floor to Bradley’s side. His choked laugher, his eyes fixed on her metal arm. _Have you come to take your revenge?_

And she asked him, instead. Not in so many words, but she asked. _Can you love? Could any of you love?_

“Your wife,” she’d said. “You have no message for her?”

And he had laughed again, and looked at her like he knew. 

_She is the woman I chose._

She looks away from Mei.

“I’m sorry,” she says, tastes it in her mouth. It is odd, apologizing to Mei. 

“Don’t be,” Mei says, and perhaps that is why; because she doesn’t need to. “Bradley said something to you, didn’t he.”

Lan Fan will forever be amazed at how perceptive the little girl is.

“I asked him,” she said, “if he had loved.”

Mei’s hands stop, and hovered in the air aimlessly above Lan Fan’s arm. “Why?” she asked, sounding lost. 

“Because,” Lan Fan says, _because I had to know if, I had to, I had to,_ and can’t find the words to explain the relief she’d felt when Bradley had said _she is the woman I chose,_ because she’d had to know, because if Bradley still loved, if Wrath still loved, then surely Greed—

“Because,” Mei echoes, and lets her hands fall to her lap.

“I had to know,” Lan Fan says, and twists her own hands together. 

Mei does not say anything else, and neither does Lan Fan, but Mei’s hands are soft as she works her alkehestry on Lan Fan’s burns.

 

It was winter, when she realized she loved him—the trees were all dead, a few leaves clinging to each one, and he had been fourteen and she had been taller by an inch and he had stood in his tipoes and veered too close and the air between them had sparked and burned, the two of them staring at each other, big-eyed, nervous. She’d started to wear her mask.

It was fall, when she realized he loved her too—the leaves were falling, and his eyes were too soft, his voice even softer, and Grandfather had left them to train together and his eyes had followed her, quick and skittish like a rabbit, and she’d wished—

She is seventeen now to his sixteen, and he is taller than she is, but only barely. He is going to be the heir to a country he has loved since infancy. The air between them still burns, more often than not, but now it doesn't only burn with possibility, it burns with the night she cut off her arm and he carried her in his arms to a safe house. It burns with Greed's sharp smile and the pain of auto-mail recovery. It burns with the mistakes they have made and corrected together. 

Through it all, she has watched him and protected him and wanted him so much she could hardly breathe with it.

Neither of them have said a word.

(She has tried everything she could think of to get herself to just _stop,_ but it never works; he laughs, and she is lost again.)

 

“What was your favorite thing about being there?” Mei asks one afternoon, when they are two days from home. Lan Fan blinks. 

“I suppose yours was Alphonse,” she says, deflecting. 

Mei giggles, and her cheeks go bright red. “Well!” she says. “There were other things too. Miss Rockbell was nice. I’d like to see her again.”

Lan Fan made a non-committal noise, remembering suddenly the way Ling had said _maybe I’ll come home with a bride!_

“And,” Mei said. “Their government might have been awful, but at least they taught people how to read.”

The bitterness is clear in her voice, and Lan fan sits up.

In the clans, women we equal in most if not all ways; owning land and running businesses simply depended on who in the family was best suited to the task. Common people—people like her grandmother, who was gone now, and her parents, who were not—were quite sensible in this way. Often, there was not enough left over when someone passed to encourage squabbles over who received inheritance. And families cared for their own, even if the family member was nearly useless. 

Lan Fan had thought the whole world was that way, until she accompanied the young master to the palace.

At court, there were stacks upon stacks of social etiquettes, dozens of rules and regulations, and women flitted about like butterflies, beautiful and empty headed, while the men and the Emperor made the decisions. The women stared at Lan Fan from behind painted fans, and whispered to each other, and it made the hair on the back of her neck stand up, even as she looked straight ahead. They seemed otherworldly and pitiful, all at once. Butterflies in cages. They were not allowed to fight, to train, to spar. They were barely allowed to travel. They could not read or cook or garden, they could not attend school. Many could not even write.

It was the life Mei would have known, too, had her clan not been so poor. If she had been brought up at court with the other princesses, she would have been a soft and empty-headed thing, and Lan Fan could not stand the idea of it.

It made sense, in an awful way. In Amestris, the military women were equals or superiors, all depending on rank. And it worked like that in Amestris, because there was space for so many of them. But with fifty wives and dozens of little princesses, how could power be given to them? How could a Wife be an Empress, when there were fifty who would claim the title?

Lan Fan could see the political success that had come from keeping these women uneducated and flighty, more interested in gossip than in the state of their country. But even so.

“I just think it’s dreadful,” Mei says, her voice hushed. “Think of what would have become of me. I wouldn’t have ever learned alkahestry, I wouldn’t have ever come to Amestris. I would never have met Mr. Scar or Alphonse . . . I wouldn’t even have Shao Mei.”

Lan Fan nods, thinking of them; butterfly women, kept there because they were pretty. Little girls raised to be the emperor’s next wife. Fourteen-year-olds, married off to the highest bidder. How was the court still like this, when the clans were not?

Grandfather would have slapped her for treason, even if she knew he did agree. Agreeing was not the problem; propriety was, and Grandfather loved propriety.

(Grandfather would have slapped her, but Grandfather was not here.)

“Sometimes I think of how I would have made it different,” Mei says. “If I had become Empress, you know. I don’t think I would have been good at it, really, not like Ling will be. He is much more kingly than I am queenly.” 

She smiles, the dimples in her cheeks making an appearance, and Lan Fan smiles back, quicksilver. 

“But I would have done away with the Wives. One wife is quite enough for any man, and one husband quite enough for any woman. I don’t see why it should be different, even for an Emperor.” She props her chin in her hands. “I think that if you loved more than one person, and you all loved each other, it would be different. But the Emperor never loves the Wives. I can’t think of one in history who has.”

They are quiet for a moment, and Mei appears to think.

“You shouldn’t marry someone,” Mei says, softly, “if you don’t love them. Don’t you think, Lan Fan?”

“It’s a romantic notion,” Lan Fan says. 

“It’s the norm, in Amestris,” Mei counters. “They didn’t have much that was correct there, but I think that part is.”

Lan Fan is quiet, and Mei goes on.

“I’d have tried to join the clans together,” she says softly. “The beginning could be small, alliances, trading posts—the Changs are very poor, but we have lovely bamboo forests and we are talented at making baskets, tables, anything you could want. But hopefully, in the end, Xing could be united.”

“And the clans would go away?” Lan Fan does not mean to sound alarmed, but it comes out that way. She loves her clan fiercely, would die defending them; she calls herself part of the Yao clan before she would even state her own last name. The thought of that comradeship and history, gone—it’s disquieting.

“No,” Mei says. “I don’t want to lose my clan and our festivals, and stories, and history. But maybe we could come to realize that even if we are different clans, we are all one country. Is it so terrible to want the clans to respect each other, and not have all these constant struggles for power and glory? You may be a Yao, and I may be a Chang, but we are both Xingese, aren’t we?”

Lan Fan turns her mask over in her hands. “Sometimes I am in awe of how clever you are, Lady Chang.”

Mei smiles. “You’re flattering me. I’m sure you’ve had all these ideas yourself, and Ling a dozen times over.”

“I have, actually,” says Ling, from behind them, and Mei jumps. Lan Fan simply turns. “My watch is over, I think,” he adds, and Mei nods, already over her scare.

“So it is. Is it my turn, then?”

“Mine,” Lan Fan says. “You need rest. You’re a child still.”

“Before I sleep, I want Ling to tell me about how he is going to change Xing,” Mei says, and her eyes laughed. “Give me something to look forward to, brother dear.”

“Only if you don’t call me brother dear,” Ling gripes, good-naturedly. “Let’s see—quite a lot of what you said. I hope to unite Xing into one country, not a bunch of squabbling clans. I want to improve relations with Amestris—shouldn’t be too hard with all the friends we’ve made there—and fix the railroad through the desert to make travel easier. There’s a lot we can learn from them, and a lot that I’m sure they can learn from us, especially alchemy-wise. I’m not sure if I’ll have influence over this, but I hope the Ishvalans can reclaim their holy land and their independence. If they do, I hope to have peaceful relations with them, as well. And I’ll do away with the Wives, and get a new council—a man and a woman from each clan, not those stuffy old men that we have now. A hundred and two people sounds like quite a lot, but we can surely house them somewhere for meetings, and it would be good to have input from all the clans on any decisions being made.”

“Your math is wrong,” Lan Fan says softly. “There would be a hundred people in the new council.”

“A hundred,” Ling says. His eyes are unusually soft. “Plus me, the Emperor. And my Empress, someday.”

Lan Fan looks away at the word _Empress,_ and after a silence, Ling clears his throat.

“I don’t want to take away our history and tradition, and I fear that’s what they’ll say I’m trying to do,” he says, and she can feel his disappointment, for some reason; she has missed a cue, hasn’t said something he had hoped she would. “I just want to improve upon the system. Nothing is ever perfect, and whatever we have must change with the times. Someday my child will make changes that might make me turn in my grave, but they will know better than I what the times require. We’ve forgotten, I think, that honoring history does not mean repeating it.”

He sounds dreamy, almost; far off. He has always been a dreamer, her prince. 

Mei yawns, and looks pleased. “You’ll do well,” she says sleepily. “I know you will.”

Lan Fan leaves the tent, ducking out into the night; her heart pounds, quick beats of _onetwothree onetwothree._

He _will_ do well, she knows this deeper than she knows anything. He will be the best emperor Xing has had in decades. But in the end it just comes down to another reason—he must belong to the country, and so he cannot belong to her. 

_His Empress_ , she thinks, and tries to imaging guarding her, too.

 

She dreams that night of losing her arm, stumbling along the dirt in the sewer and only thinking _let him get out, let him live, let him live,_ and then she woke up to see him (it only seemed like a second) and his hands were soft against her cheeks, his forehead pressed to hers, and she could taste salt against her mouth—

“Don’t cry, young lord,” she’d said. “Not for me.”

“Your arm,” he’d answered, and she hadn’t answered, her eyes already sliding shut again.

She wasn’t quite sure if she’d imagined the feeling of his mouth on her forehead, as she drifted back into sleep.

(Afterwards, he had been Greed, and there was no way to ask.)

 

When she wakes the next morning, he is watching her.

“Mei’s on watch,” he says, before she can ask, then, “you won’t talk to me.”

Her shoulders tense, and he looks away, and she can see the sadness in the lines of his body. She tries not to feel awful.

“I know you know,” he says, and she does not look at him. “I—please, you don’t have to ignore me.”

“What do I know?” she asks.

He makes a pained noise. “Lan Fan.”

She ducks her head, and doesn’t say anything.

“Do you remember,” he says, when it becomes clear she is not going to answer. “When we were children, and we found the pond?”

They had run away from training and from Grandfather, at Ling’s request; he had gone, running laughing down the path, almost clumsy, his growing limbs too big for his body. She had followed, because she always followed.

_We should run away together,_ he said, _and live in the woods,_ and then he had laughed, like he didn’t really mean it.

_We couldn’t, the clan needs us, young lord,_ she had said, and he had never mentioned it again, just laughed at the tadpoles swimming below them, dipping his hands into the water to let them nibble at the tips of his fingers. 

“That was when I knew, I think,” he says, and she is wrenched out of the memory. “Maybe not all the way. But I loved you then.”

Hearing the words aloud makes her want to stand, or pace, or leave. Or put her mask over her face. Grandfather would not have let it come to this.

“We were children,” she says, but what she means is _how could you have known?_

“Yes,” he says. “And you laughed, at the tadpoles. And I thought how beautiful you looked when you laughed.”

She swallows, hard. His eyes are soft, and he stands and crosses the room, sitting down next to her bed. 

“Lan Fan,” he says, too quietly for it to mean anything other than _please._ She doesn’t know what he is asking for, only that he is asking. 

She closes her eyes, and tries to think. But having him so close burns up her blood, sharpens it to a boil, and she can’t think, not anymore.

“I wish,” he says, and then stops, and sighs. 

She knows. She wishes, too. 

In that instant, she wishes so hard that it aches, and her heart flutters like something frail and underused and discontent, and she rests her fingertips against his cheek.

He does not kiss her. She is not certain that she wants him to. But their foreheads tilt together, and they breathe in sync, and it is enough, for that moment.

She does not think it will be enough forever, but it has to be. She will make it last, she will hold it close. He is her prince in this moment, her boy who laughed at the tadpoles, whose tears fell onto her face. He does not belong to Xing yet, and that is all she can ask—for this one instant, where he is hers.

 

They return to Xing. They go to the palace. 

His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor of Xing, names Ling Yao his heir.

Lan Fan returns to her mother and father, and buries her grandfather’s ashes next to her grandmother’s, next to the berry bushes in the garden. The heir to the throne of Xing stands by her side, and the seventeenth princess of Xing behind them.

She takes a deep breath; in and out.

When her grandmother died, she was ten years old, and she stood here too, with Grandfather next to her, his head bowed and his eyes red, the only time she had ever seen him weep (until her arm, until her arm).

She had tried to comfort him. “All things must end, Grandfather.”

He had smiled, and shook his head. “Not love, little girl,” he said. “Not love.”

_All things must end,_ he had said, and wept for her arm, and died for the prince. _All things will end,_ he had said, and looked from her to the prince and back again.

_Not love_ ,she thinks, now, standing here. Ling is a half step behind her, and she thinks—his hand on her cheek, his eyes soft on hers. _Not this._

“Come on,” Ling said, his hand on her shoulder. She does not shove him away, not this time. “Let’s go home.” 

Time will pass, she knows, even when it feels impossible. Someday the loss of her grandfather will just be a dull ache. All things will end. 

But she will still love him, and she will still love her country, and she will still love her prince.

“Yes,” she says. “There is work to do.”


	2. a bird could love a fish

The train slides into the newly built station with a soft hiss of steam, and Lan Fan watches as the cloud of black smoke trails from the engine. It dissipates as it gets farther away, and her eyes follow it, feeling bare without her mask to cover her face and stop people from seeing the movements of her eyes. No one will recognize her like this, no one except the people in the train she is here to retrieve, but it is still unsettling, to be barefaced in public; to know that someone could shoot her from a rooftop in an act against the emperor, and there would be nothing she could do.

She shakes herself out of those kinds of thoughts, before they can get out of hand, and watches the people streaming out of the train, mainly Amestrian tourists, their first-ever batch. They pass her by without a second glance, babbling loud in their harsh, rasping language; off to complain about how the food is too spicy and they don't like eating on the floor. She allows herself a sliver of a smile at the thought, remembering how Ling had hated it there at first, refusing to eat because the food  _tasted like nothing._

She watches as a small group of people step off the train, talking quietly, respectfully, and smiles again, slightly wider, and raises her auto-mail hand in greeting.

Edward Elric beams at her from across the station, his suitcase flung over his shoulder and his fingers tangled with Winry Rockbell's, and they cross the station to her quickly, pausing to bow in greeting. She bows back, and bites back her grin when she says "So I see you remember your manners this time, Edward."

"Hey, give me some credit," he says, and laughs, and holds his arms out for a hug. She steps into it willingly, and then clasps Winry's hands between hers. The other girl stares with shameless curiosity at Lan Fan's auto-mail, but doesn't say anything, just smiles and greets her.

"Done with your happy reunion, Elric?" Colonel Mustang says, clapping him on the shoulder. Winry laughs.

"This is nothing, wait until he sees Al!"

Edward visibly brightens at the mentioning of his brother's name. "He's not here, right?" he asks, looking around as though Lan Fan has hidden him in a bush. She bites back another smile and shakes her head.

"Come with me. He is in the palace, with Lady Chang and His Imperial Majesty."

Her formality surprises them, she can see it in their eyes. Perhaps they have not learned as much about politeness in Xing as they think.

She counts them with a quick sweep of her eyes—four in all, certainly not too many to keep track of in the palace—and gestures to the road. "Come, I'll walk with you to the palace."

"There's so many tourists," Winry comments. "Al said there weren't so many, why so many now?"

"I'll let him explain," Lan Fan says, and she is silent for the rest of the walk as they chatter behind her.

 

 

"You son of a bitch," is the first thing Edward says, but he's laughing, and it is directed at Alphonse, so Lan Fan steps aside and supposes it means nothing. "You're getting fucking married, aren't you?"

Alphonse goes red. "They weren't supposed to tell you!"

"Ha ha, like I wouldn't figure it out," Edward says, and beams. "That's awesome, Al. I'm so happy for you."

"That's kind of why you were invited," Alphonse said, and grinned sheepishly. "For the wedding."

"Well, where's the lucky girl?" Colonel Mustang interrupts, and Lan Fan hears Mei enter the room in a swish of fabric.

"Here I am!" she says, ever cheerful. "Hello! Edward, Winry, it's so good to see you again in person. Lan Fan, his Majesty my brother says to meet him in the throne room in ten minutes, he needs to talk the new council plan over with you."

Lan Fan bows her head, and Mei laughs, a high, glittering thing. She has taken to court well enough, now that it is their new court, the one that allows for a glittering girl like Mei Chang, who reads and delegates and smiles prettily enough you forget you were angry with her.

"You're getting married this week?" Winry says, and scrunches her eyebrows together. "Isn't that awfully soon?"

Alphonse shrugs. "I've been in love with her for the better part of four years," he says. "Why wait?"

Lan Fan feels a pull in her stomach, and Mei looks at her, her eyes open and kind, and mouths  _go._  Grateful for the permission, even though it was more of a suggestion than anything else, Lan fan bows out of the room and enters the hall, and allows herself one moment to stand there silently, eyes closed, regulating her breathing.

One moment is apparently enough for Winry to slip out after her, because when she opens her eyes, the other woman is there, smiling tentatively.

"I just wondered—are you okay?"

Lan Fan smiles, and it feels like she is contorting her face into an expression it has never made before. She is not okay, not by what must be Winry's definition of the word, but she is not in Amestris, where  _okay_  matters. She is in Xing, and she must do her duty.

She wishes, fleetingly, that her duty was one that left a smile feeling more natural on her face.

"I am perfectly well," she says, and Winry looks skeptical, and extends a hand to her arm, picking it up without permission and turning the wrist in her practiced hands. Lan Fan lets her. It is not as though she could do any harm.

"You were making a face," Winry says. "I don't know, these aren't supposed to have constant pain so many years later, but—"

Lan Fan swallows a bubble of a laugh. "It is not anything to do with my arm, Miss Rockbell."

Winry makes a face. "Just Winry.  _Please._  I get enough politeness in my shop and from all these military people trying to recruit Ed again, I don't need it from—" And her voice falters, unsure. "A friend."

A group of courtiers turns the corner, floating like a brightly colored cloud down the hall, and a hissing whisper begins, wordless but icy. Winry drops Lan Fan's wrist as if it has burned her, and looks even more unsure.

"His Imperial Majesty," one of the courtiers says to Lan Fan, looking like he has smelled something he would never wish to smell again, "wants to see you in his chambers."

Another hiss of whispers and titters breaks out, and Lan Fan straightens her back and bows with respect. "I will report to him immediately."

The courtier sniffs. "See that you do," he says, in all ways disinterested, and turns to walk away. One of the whispers floats toward them.

"She really is his bitch! How like a dog, to come when it is called . . ."

Lan Fan sees from the look on Winry's face that she has heard as well, and silences her with a sharp look when she opens her mouth.

"You can't let them call you that!" she hisses, the moment the courtiers turn the corner and are out of sight. "That's vulgar, it's awful, they can't say that to you!"

"What does it matter to me?" Lan Fan said calmly, crossing her arms. The whispers have long since ceased to bother her. They began when she was thirteen and have continued since, and she doubts they will ever be gone entirely, no matter how well she does her job. She has forced herself not to care. "They have called me worse."

They have called her worse.  _Whore_  and  _dog_  are the least of it.

Winry's eyes are blazing. "They should show you more respect, you're going to be Empress someday—"

The world stops, narrows to a singular point, the word  _Empress;_  burning in Lan Fan's gut, falling from Winry's mouth. This is the only word that still hurts.

"Who told you that?" Lan Fan says, loud in the echoing hall, and then furiously lowers her voice to a hiss. "Who told you such a lie?"

Winry's anger falters, falls into uncertainty. "But Alphonse said—" and oh, she is going to wring Alphonse's handsome neck, wedding be damned. "Alphonse said you two loved each other, that you loved him, I—" Winry swallows nervously, and her eyes dart from side to side. "I thought—I thought you loved him, doesn't that mean something?"

Lan Fan wants to fall against the wall, wrap her arms around her middle, and ache the way she has been aching since the engagement was announced. But she does not. She lets the ache burn in her instead, like the ache in her muscles after training.

"I love him," she says, finally. It is an easy thing to admit. "That does not mean I believe in fairy tales."

 

 

It is a dull ache, and she is used to it now. She has endured. She will endure.

Mei is getting married.

Mei is getting married, and Lan Fan will watch, and kiss her hands for luck, and ache, and ache, and ache.

Mei is getting married, and she loves Alphonse dearly, and it will never be that way, not for her, not ever.

She cannot hope for something like that.

 

 

"Your Majesty," she says, and bows low. "You wanted to see me?"

She sees her own ache reflected in his eyes every time she looks, so she does not look.

"Yes," he says, after a beat too long, and waves her over. "The council is still giving me a headache." He smiles wryly, and shrugs. "We have a million different places we  _could_  put them, but it seems like every place will offend a different person. Now, a lot of them are people I don't much care about offending, but you know how it will look, and the only other place large enough is the training grounds, and we need that for the guard training—how is that going, by the way?"

"It's going very well," she says. "The prospects are excellent. And several of the elder guards wish to retire, and I am inclined to let them—they deserve the rest of the time with their families."

He nods. "Good, good. I'd have done the same. Have you found any places for the council?"

"I think the best place would be the old theater in the city," she says, and he nods.

"Worn down, though."

She shrugs. "That is easily repaired. It is large enough, everyone can be heard."

"I wonder," Ling muses, "if it would put everyone on unequal footing. The speaker would be onstage, and everyone else in the audience. No one would be able to argue."

She nods. "I hadn't thought of that." She sits down and studies the list of places. Some have comments beside them, cramped Xingese characters, the ink nearly running together in the hurry. She deciphers it easily. She could read his handwriting from the time he learned to write.

"If they were smaller, a table of some kind would do," he says. "Right now, all I can think of is a big circle, with everyone shouting to be heard." He chuckles, and rubs his hands over his face. "It's a bit of a mess. I never thought it would be this hard to figure out."

"Keep thinking," she says. "Someone will get an idea eventually."

"I will be old and grey by the time someone figures it out," he says, and flops dramatically onto a chair. "They'll make me into a parable. The Emperor's New Council."

She chuckles, and then lowers her head. It is in moments like this that he reminds her most of her boy, the boy he was when they were children, the boy he was in the tent on the way back from Amestris, his forehead pressed to hers. She tries not to remember that he was hers once. It only makes the ache worse, just like looking at him, just like listening to Mei plan her wedding.

"Mei asked me to ask you something," Ling says, his voice forcedly casual. "She wants you to stand with her at the wedding."

Lan Fan hopes the dread she's feeling doesn't sink into her voice. " _You_  are standing with her."

"Yes," he says. His voice is still forced in how casual it sounds. "She wants us both."

It was traditionally the bride's family, but Mei had asked for Ling, saying he was close enough. The bride's family and the groom's family would embrace and shake hands, symbolizing the two families becoming one, and Ling had been cheerful for weeks at the idea of seeing the Elrics again, and even more so at the idea of making them family.

"She said you would argue," Ling says. "I was told to tell you you're more her family than anyone besides me, and she wants you to be part of her wedding."

Lan Fan's stomach churned.

"I will speak with her," she says, feeling thrown, uneasy. "I can't—"

"You should," Ling says. "She loves you."

He looks like he regrets saying it the moment it comes out of his mouth, and her heart thuds weakly, remembering  _I loved you then_  and all the times he's said it since, even as she tries to tell herself to stop.

"Lan Fan—"

She stands, and bows. "If you'll excuse me, your Majesty," she says, and she is out the door quicker than she thought she could, and walks to her room, and crouches over her sink, and shudders.

She looks ruined and animalistic when she looks up at herself in the mirror, and she thinks loving him is tearing her apart from the inside.

 

 

The way he said her name had always been her undoing. It strengthens the ache to a crippling thing, makes her remember that they could have made different choices, that they could have been something different. She has long-lost dreams of running away, of never coming back to the palace, of living somewhere else with berry bushes and tea leaves and waking up next to him in the mornings. They are fever dreams, never to brush with reality, but they are there, and she cannot help but return to them sometimes, when he says her name like that.

It is not as though either of them could have done it. He would never run from his country, and she would never run from him.

But still, she wishes.

It is a maddening thing, wishing. A dangerous thing, even, in this world, in this court.

Everyone is educated, now, Ling has seen to that. But there are still the old Wives, who live in their apartments and flutter from one room to the next. The butterfly women have not touched any of the books, or spoken to any of the tutors. They long for how things used to be, even as their daughters learn hungrily, soaking knowledge in like sponges.

The butterfly women, and the old council. They are the ones that resist Ling's changes, resist the education, resist the uniting of the clans.

They are the ones that send whispers whirling through the air about Lan Fan, and her devotion, and the metal of her arm, gleaming in the sunlight.

 _Ugly,_  the whispers go.  _Deformed, disgusting. Befitting of a servant. Befitting of a dog._

And she does not mind, because she cannot mind; because her job is so bow and back away and do her duty to her country and her people and her Emperor—

Except, here, in her room, staring into the mirror at herself and her arm, she minds, so much she can barely stand straight.

 _She must be fucking him,_  the whispers go.  _Why else would he keep an incompetent girl around, one who lost her arm? She can't be that good, if she couldn't even keep herself safe._

Lan Fan stares into the mirror, and she looks like a stranger, staring back.

 

 

"Edward and Winry don't know," Mei says later. "Even Alphonse. They don't understand."

What she is saying is  _they didn't want to hurt you,_  and Lan Fan believes her. Mei has not changed much, even if the rest of them have. She is still a small and clever and glittering thing, with soft eyes. She still cares, and it still runs deep.

Lan Fan has taken her up on her offer of being friends.

"I do not blame them," Lan Fan says. "I don't think they will ever understand. I did not come here because of that."

Mei looks at her, even and sure. "Then why?"

"You want me to stand with you in your wedding," Lan Fan says. "I cannot accept such an offer."

"It is not an offer," Mei says. "It is tradition. You are my family."

Lan Fan shakes her head. "I can't."

"Lan Fan," Mei says, and grasps her hands. "I know this hurts you. But please, don't let yourself wallow in it. Stand with me. I hoped it would help you remember that—that some things are good."

Lan Fan remains silent, head bowed, mind whirling.

"I don't pretend to know how you feel," Mei says, "but I hear the things they say about you. I tell them off as much as I can, but sometimes they don't listen, not even to me."

"I can't do this for you, Mei," Lan Fan says, and the steel in her voice feels so much more forced than usual, and she is so, so tired. "Anything else, and I would, but this—I just can't."

"I won't force you," Mei says, and she sounds sad. "But let me know if you change your mind."

 

 

More than a year ago, Mei cornered Lan Fan on the training grounds, after she had finished with some new recruits.

"I expect I will marry Alphonse someday," she said, her hands twisting together almost nervously, like Lan Fan would get angry, or tell her no. "And I expect when I do, he will try to marry you."

Lan Fan froze, her hands in midair, unwrapping the bandage from her fist. "Lady Chang—"

"Don't  _Lady Chang_  me," Mei warned. "We are alone. I'm just stating facts."

Lan Fan closed her eyes. "He won't."

"He is a dreamer, and he loves you," Mei fired back. "He has loved you for years. And he is forever an optimist."

"Mei," Lan Fan said, and hated how her voice trembled. "Please do not say such things to me, or to anyone."

"You're afraid of me being right," Mei said, angrily. "You don't want to admit that maybe something could be  _done_  about this."

"Maybe I don't," Lan Fan said, only a bare whisper, her voice cracking in the middle of the third word. "Maybe it will only make it hurt more, in the end."

" _Maybe_  it will let you have happiness," Mei said. "I think that is worth it."

"You live in a dream," Lan Fan said, whirling around to meet her eyes. "A happy dream, where you and Alphonse marry, and you live long and wonderful lives together. Do not ask me to dream it with you, I can't, I never could. That dream is not for me."

The line of Mei's jaw was stubborn. "Ling will dream it."

"Then may the gods help him when it does not come true," Lan Fan said, and turned around again, and heard the sounds of steps; angry, stomping steps, the sound of Mei storming away.

(Mei found her later, again; extended her palms in a gesture of peace. "I'm sorry," she said. "I just wish you could be as happy as I am."

"I  _am_  happy," Lan Fan said, and Mei smiled sadly, and shook her head.

"No," she said, "you aren't.")

 

 

"You there," Lan Fan hears from behind her, and turns to see one of the members of the Old Council; the one Ling is dismantling. She represses a grimace, and bows.

"Can I help you, my lord?"

"You have the Emperor's ear," he says, with an expression of abject boredom. "You must find a way to explain to him that he must marry before the year is over."

"Must," Lan Fan echoes. She does not know why, but the boldness of it surprises her. Perhaps because she is so used to the prodding, the nearly-silent whispers, the comments in the air that she must pretend she does not hear. But this man does not care about offense, does not seem to be considering propriety.

She realizes, as he sighs with boredom and looks away, that it is because she does not matter enough to be polite to.

"Are you deaf?" he snaps. "You must explain it to him. The gods only know why, but he does appear to listen to you." The man waves her off like a fly. "It is shameful that the Princess should marry a foreigner, but even more so that the Emperor has not taken even a single Wife."

The word  _wife_  brands her insides, and she keeps her head bowed.

"I will inform him right away," she says, keeps her voice low; respectful. The man sniffs and walks away.

She straightens her back, and she can feel the eyes on her; greedy eyes of butterfly women, waiting for her to show the slightest sign of weakness.

She does not give them the satisfaction.

 

 

"I dunno," Edward is saying, later, "I just thought it would have changed more."

She pauses outside the door. She had come to find Mei, but it appeared she was not alone.

A sigh. "I thought so too," Mei says. "Things  _have_  changed, you just wouldn't notice unless you were born here."

"Those things they said about Lan Fan," Winry says. "I couldn't believe it. And she just stood there like it didn't matter."

"It doesn't, anymore," Mei says, and she sounds sad. "They've called her worse since she was thirteen. And it doesn't help that Ling is—well, Ling. He trusts her and values her and shows it, and that just makes them more jealous. And meaner."

A silence follows her words, and Lan Fan turns to leave, but is stopped when she hears Mei again.

"He wants them all out of the palace," Mei says. "All the old Council, all the old Wives. A fresh start. He hates that things are like this, especially when they've both done so much."

Lan Fan flees. It is too close to Mei's talk of dreams and happiness a year ago, and she cannot bear to listen.

 

 

She escapes the wedding planning for a while the next day, heading up to his chambers to see what's keeping him there. She would have thought he would have been with their guests every minute he could, but instead he stays here, pouring over papers and plans and ideas, trying to make Xing better.

"The old counselors have been talking with me," she says.

He glances up at her, the back at the papers on his desk. "How angry are they that I'm making a new council?"

"I don't think they know you're doing it," she says. "Or at the very least, they don't believe you will go through with it. I suppose they are concerned with other things."

He laughs, but it comes out bitter. "They've been asking," he says, with a very controlled kind of calmness in his voice, "if there is going to be another royal wedding soon."

Lan Fan tries to keep her voice even. "There are several candidates that would be excellent," she says, to his back, unable to look him in they eyes. "The Huangs, for example, have several noble daughters—"

The details stand out fresh and stark in her mind, both from earlier and all the other times she has had them told to her. There are many, many daughters acceptable to wed an Emperor. No family would refuse such an offer.

He will wed, someday, and she will still be here, and it is a truth she has long ago accepted. One that she must continue to accept, and she tries, she  _tries._

"Do you think that's what I  _want_?" he shouts, and whirls around, and she thinks wildly that she has never seen him so angry, before she realizes the look in his eyes is pain. She remembers back when she was still angry about this, when she could still dredge up the pain. Now she is cold and aching, now she is more steel than girl. Her arm became steel, and her heart followed. (This is what it takes to stay alive in court.)

"Do you think I could stop loving you so easily?" he asks, voice low, and he looks at her like his pain is still fresh. She does not know how he could bear it, holding onto hope all these years.

"Marriage," she says, "has very little to do with love," and her voice is dull.

"Bullshit," he snaps. "And you know it."

She knows he is thinking of Mei and Aphonse, who have wedding plans and secret smiles and a whole host of things that can never be true, not for them. "We cannot have what they have, your Majesty."

He makes a noise, like she has punched him with the title.

She gathers the papers from the table in a brisk, efficient movement.

"Have you forgotten me so quickly?" he asks, and she knows it is meant to hurt her, an angry jab at a half-healed wound. She does not flinch. She looks him in the eyes.

"You say that as though anything could change how I feel about you," she says, and a shudder runs through him, and she realizes: this is the first time she has ever confirmed it aloud. Six years, and this is the only time. "But I know what is real and what is a dream."

He crosses the room, and before she knows what has happened, his hands are cradling her face, and the papers clutched so neatly in her arms flutter to the floor.

His eyes are desperate, pleading, and it is not a warm kiss; it is too frenzied and terrified and full of aching, it is a stolen kiss, one that should not belong to either of them. But it stalls her heart, and then sets it beating again twice as quickly, and her hands reach his face and his arms slide around her, and he does not flinch away from the cold metal of her hand tracing his cheek. He crushes their bodies close, and she is dizzy, her heart fluttering like a fragile, underused thing in her chest. He has melted her. Her steel is gone.

 _It will hurt much worse now, in the end,_  she thinks, but finds that at the moment, she doesn't care. She pulls him closer.

And oh, it will hurt. Tomorrow, when she remembers he belongs to Xing, it will hurt more than anything has ever hurt before. More than her arm, more than losing Grandfather.

But she is selfish, and he is kissing her, and she loves him more than she can bear.

For the moment, it is enough.

 

 

"I'm going to change it," he told her once, just after he was named heir; with Grandfather buried and the three of them living in the palace. "I'm going to make it so much better."

She'd remembered his dreams, from in the tent; her dreamer, her prince. Waving his hands and fixing Xing, making their homeland great again.

"I know you will," she said.

"And I'll only have one wife," he said. "A united country, and an Empress who will help me lead it. It will all be better then. You'll see."

Somewhere, she has always known that when he says  _Empress_  he means  _you._

It does not make it hurt any less to hear.

 

 

The wedding creeps up on them, a traditional ceremony with fifty ambassadors, one from each clan, and then the Amestrians; Roy Mustang acting as a representative from Amestris, even though technically that title belongs to Alphonse. The man named Scar who comes from Ishvala—a surprise visitor, at the last minute. Mei wept from joy to see him and his graying ponytail, and he smiles proudly through the whole ceremony, like she is his own family, like he is prouder of her than anything.

A traditional ceremony, with the officiate tying ribbons around Mei and Alphonse's clasped hands, and the bride dressed all in red.

Funny, but Lan Fan cannot remember any traditional ceremonies where the bride and groom looked at each other with such love in their eyes.

"I give you my life," Mei says, her voice strong and clear as a bell. She is sure, and Alphonse is beaming, and it is a lovely thing to see; the two of them drawn into each other's orbits as seamlessly as comets circling stars.

"And I give you mine," Alphonse says, and Edward is weeping, though Lan Fan is sure he will deny it fiercely later. Mei throws her arms around Alphonse's neck, and he laughs, picking her up and swinging her around, and it is nothing like a stately, traditional Xingese wedding, not anymore, not with their laughter ringing out, their arms around each other. Mei's laughter is high and tinkling and cuts off with Al's lips on hers, and Lan Fan feels a twist in her stomach; of shame and of jealously, burning sharp.

 _I want this,_  she realizes. She cannot deny it anymore. She does not believe it will ever be true, but she wants it. She wants to be with him. She wants to let this ache end. It has taken her so long to admit it, but here it was; and still, nothing would come of it. This changed nothing, except for her.

She cannot pretend it doesn't matter anymore. She is too tired for that.

And then it is the family's turn to move, and Ling surges forward to embrace Edward and Winry, both at once; clapping them on the back and welcoming them to his family and saying how  _happy_  he was and he looks it, he looks blazing and happy, looks like her boy back with the tadpoles and the pond, all bright smiles and sunshine and  _I loved you then._ He loved her then, and she loves him now. If only, if only.

Winry comes to Lan Fan, when the ceremony has dissolved into the reception, and they wrap their arms around each other, and Winry looks at her and laughs, and says "I didn't know you cried."

Lan Fan wipes her eyes, and lies. "Only for the happiest of occasions."

"Me too," Winry says, and shoots a glowing look at Alphonse and Edward, who are hugging each other and laughing. "Me too."

Ling's eyes follow her through the rest of the party, constant and sure, like a heartbeat. He has heard the lie.

She meets his eyes for just a moment, and then looks away.

 

 

"Come with me," he says, after the ceremony is over and they are all retreating to their rooms for the night, full of good cheer and good will. "I need to speak with you about something."

Mei's eyes follow her as they walk out the door.

 

 

"I want to marry you," Ling says, and the world topples on its axis. She shakes her head, refuses to consider it. The voices in her head chant  _you cannot you cannot you cannot._  They stand in his room, together, inches apart, and he wants to marry her, and she wants to weep.

She looks away, instead, shakes her head again, but the trembling of her hands gives her away.

"I can't stand this anymore," he says, and his voice is soft; his hands even softer as they reach out to take hers. "I don't want to stand it. Please, just look at me."

"I don't—" she says, and her voice shakes. "I can't. You don't."

"Everyone knew," he said. " _Mei_  knew, I thought she must have told you sometime—"

"I didn't listen." It had only been a taunt, to her; only people telling her about the things she wished for and could not have.

"You should have," he says. "Please. We can change things, we were going to do it anyway with all the clans—and if we do away with the clans, I only need one wife, don't I?"

She swallows a laugh that threatens to bubble up, half hysterical. Tries to imagine herself as the wife of the Emperor, no longer allowed to fight or read or garden or do any of the things that pleased her. To have to sit around all day and look pretty—

"Please don't say these things to me," she says, instead of laughing again. "I can't—I shouldn't even be thinking about it, we're not allowed—"

"Lan Fan—"

"I cannot be your wife," she says. "I could never be your wife, and I could never give up fighting, and reading, and  _freedom,_  and how do you think the Court would welcome an Empress with a  _metal arm_ , a  _servant,_  it's not possible, no one would take us seriously and I don't  _deserve_ —"

"You deserve the world," Ling says, and his hands came up, so that he was cradling her face fully. "And nowhere in there did I hear you didn't love me."

She shakes her head, horrified with herself. "Of course I love you, but how could we—"

He cuts her off with his mouth on hers.

She melts against him, can't help herself, closes her eyes and kisses him, kisses him, kisses him. He smiles into her mouth, pleased and soft, and pulls back an inch to press their foreheads together.  _Xing, forgive me._

"Do you think I would make you change?" he asks. "Do you think I would want you to? I love you because you're you, because you're brave and a fighter and you know what to do in every situation. That's why I want to marry you. That's what matters," he says, and his thumb moves, tracing her cheek. "Don't you see?"

"See what?"

"The two of us," he says. "Together. We found the secret to immortality, what's changing a country after that? We can do it. We can do anything."

"And a bird could love a fish," she says, and she is hoarse. "But where would they live?"

It is a proverb well loved by her grandfather, used most often when she said the words  _it isn't fair._ She remembers, most vividly, a moment when she was ten years old, and he told her she could not be the young master's friend, because she was his servant, and it was not her place.

" _That's not fair! I am his friend! He's my friend! I don't want to stop!"_

_Her grandfather was quiet and calm at her rage, and stood still, his face like carved stone._

" _And a bird could befriend a fish," he said, calmly. "What difference would it make if the fish loved the bird? If the bird wanted to be the fish's friend? One is from the water, and one is from the sky."_

" _I am not a fish," Lan Fan said, but her rage had burnt out, and she could only feel sad._

" _And the young master is not a bird," Fu agreed. "But he is a prince, and you are not a princess."_

Ling throws up his hands, and for the first time seems impatient, pacing the room. "We would live in the palace. You would be my Empress, and I would be your Emperor. You're brave and clever and you know how to make decisions, and I never do a thing without consulting you anyway, and most importantly, I love you. I want to be with you for the rest of my life. Tell me, if you think I can change all of XIng, surely I can change the role of the Empress, too?"

"Ling—"

"You aren't a fish and I'm not a bird. We're people, and we're walking on land, together. And we'll have to argue with a dozen and a half dull people who think they know better than me how I feel about you and a dozen more who don't want the Empress to have any power because they're old-fashioned and awful, and we'll have to attend a thousand council meetings and do a bunch of paperwork, probably, but I don't  _care,_  I don't  _care._  I love you and that's what matters to me. I love Xing and I love you and I'm sick of everyone telling me I can't do both at once."

"That's very greedy, Ling Yao," she says, and her voice is barely a whisper. Her head is buzzing, and she feels curiously light. He has never done anything like this, neve rsaid a word of it. She knew he ached, just like she did, but she never knew it was this bubbling frustration, this willingness to tear everything down to make room for her next to him. "He really did rub off on you."

"He wanted to be king of the world," Ling disagrees. "I just want Xing, and you with me."

"And so the bird loved the fish," Lan Fan whispers. The buzzing is still in her head, but it fills her limbs, now, too; bubbling like champagne.

Ling sighs, and rubs his hands over his face. "I've always hated that metaphor." He sounds defeated, unsure, for the first time.

Lan Fan smiles, and reaches out to take his hands, her heart fluttering madly, her head buzzing. She is hoping, and it is so, so dangerous. But he is her boy, her dreamer, and she thinks perhaps he has finally made her believe. "And the fish loved the bird, and it turned out they were only humans, after all."

Ling turns to her, a wild sort of hope in his eyes. "I like that ending better."

She closes her eyes, and tries to stop thinking about what she  _should_  say. What does she  _want_  to say?

She reaches out, and brushes her fingers over Ling's palm. "I," she says, and then stops, because she is blushing; reaches up to cover her face with her hand. "I love you too, I've always—"

He makes a soft noise, in the back of his throat, and pulls her hand off her face.

"Always," she repeats, a whisper again.

He closes the distance between them.

This kiss is softer than their first, than their second. This kiss tastes like berries and promises and home, and hope, at last.

"And if it doesn't work," Lan Fan whispers, pulling back, his hand still cradling her cheek.

"It will."

"If it doesn't," she repeats.

"Then we'll find another way to make it work," Ling says, and smiles, dizzy and beautiful and optimistic. "You and I, we can do anything."

She scoffs, a little, and he pulls back, still grinning.

"Do you trust me?" he asks, a little more seriously.

She does not know if she believes him entirely, not yet. And she knows there is a fight ahead of them. But even so, there is only one answer she can give.

"With my life."

He squeezes her hand, easy and sure.

"Then it will work. I promise."

She trusts him.

 

 

Mei finds her the next morning, and wordlessly embraces her, holding her tightly in a way that Lan Fan does not think she has been held since she was a child.

And when Mei pulls back, and asks " _Are you happy_?" Lan Fan does not have to lie.

"Yes," she says, and smiles. Somewhere in the palace, her boy is dissolving the council. By the end of the week, the butterfly women and the old councilmen will be gone. By the end of the month, the new council will be situated in the city surrounding the palace, and they will begin the work of uniting the clans. By the end of the year, Lan Fan will be Empress.

 _And so the bird loved the fish_ , she thinks.

She is hoping now, and hope is a very dangerous thing.

(It can, for example, change a country.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know this chapter was later than i'd hoped, but here it is! i feel like i've read it so many times that it just seems dreadful to me now, but i do hope you enjoy it, and please leave me a comment if you did or if you have anything you think could be fixed! hopefully i will have more fics coming soon, but maybe a bit slower, because i have started school again. anyway, i hope you liked this, and have a lovely day!
> 
> also, the title and the proverb in this chapter came from another fmab fic i read: [one more time with feeling](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1144100). i didn't come up with it on my own, i just thought it was cool!


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